In recent years, virtualization techniques have been progressing and proliferating, which has led to an increase in the numbers of systems that employ virtual machines to realize servers for providing services. This also leads to an increase in the amount of power consumed in data centers for operating server computers that realize the virtual machines, and has resulted in the urgent need for a reduction in the amount of power consumed.
In the virtualized environment, virtual machines operated on different pieces of hardware (computers) are caused to operate on the same hardware, enabling efficient use of resources. Currently, however, the number of the virtual machines operated on the same hardware is extremely limited so as to maintain the service levels for the virtual machines, so that available resources are not fully utilized.
In order to integrate the virtual machines into the reduced amount of hardware while maintaining the levels of the services, it is important to accurately estimate the capacity of the hardware and the capacity necessary for the virtual machines. If this estimation is not accurately made, the amount of hardware needed increases. This is because, to maintain the levels of the service, it is inevitable to estimate the necessary capacity of the virtual machines to be larger, so that the number of the virtual machines to be operated on the same hardware has to be set to be smaller.
Patent Document 1 described below proposes a technique that enables performance tests for an information processing system to be automatically conducted continuously under different measurement conditions. More specifically, Patent Document 1 proposes conducting the performance tests for an information processing system on the basis of data on the performance tests generated by arbitrarily combining setting values for items under different measurement conditions.